PART 5 — THE RING
The conviction was vacated in the December.
Not by a heroic courtroom moment. By Wendell Achterberg’s forty-one-page examination of a device image, an invoice for four thousand dollars, and eleven timestamps that put a phone in a car park when a code was received.
The eight months between that van stopping at a gate and that vacatur are the part nobody ever asks about.
I was not in custody and I was not free. I was on a suspended execution with conditions: surrendered passport, weekly reporting, and an address that had to be approved.
The approved address was a two-bedroom on the north side that my father paid for and that I fought him about for nine days before I ran out of arguments, because a woman on a suspended sentence cannot sign a lease.
I could not work. Nobody in industrial finance in this state was going to employ a chief financial officer with a live fraud conviction, suspended or otherwise, and I stopped applying in the third month.
I saw my son twice a week, supervised, for the first eleven weeks, at a county contact centre with a play mat and a two-way window.
That is the detail I would put in front of anybody who thinks a suspended sentence is a win. My six-year-old had to be handed to me by a stranger with a clipboard, in a room with a mat on the floor, because of eleven text messages my husband received on a phone plan he administered.
The supervision came off in the June after a report from the same caseworker who wrote the first one.
What I did with those eight months, mostly, was work for Wendell.
He is sixty-eight, he does forensic examination for insurers and occasionally for defence, and his office is a converted garage with four monitors in it.
He let me sit there. Not to touch anything — I never touched a keyboard in that room and I made a point of it and so did he — but to read what the outside firm had produced and to say out loud, as a chief financial officer, which parts of a reconciliation do not behave the way that report said they behaved.
I gave him about four hundred hours. He billed my father for a hundred and eleven.
On the day the order came through, Wendell Achterberg shook my hand in his driveway and said, “Mrs. Renquist, I want to be clear that we found this because you knew what the workflow looked like. Nobody else in that file did.”
The county did not re-try. The prosecutor’s office issued three paragraphs and did not use the word sorry, and I have been told by four separate people that this is the best you get and I have decided to accept it.
Brett was charged in the February. He pleaded in the autumn and he is serving eight years and he will do about five.
My mother was charged separately. The financial matter and the instrument concerning the townhouse. She is sixty-six with no record and she has a very good lawyer and it resolved without custody, with restitution she will be paying until she is eighty-one.
I have not spoken to her since the January.
She has written eleven times. I opened the first two. The second one contains the sentence I did what I did so that you would not be a girl who was somebody’s mistake, which is the closest thing to an admission in any of them and which is still, if you read it carefully, about her.
Brynn Ostergaard was not charged with anything and as far as I can establish did not know. She moved out of the state in the spring. I have never spoken to her and I would not know what to say.
Cass is seven now. He has been in play therapy since the March and he will be for a while, and he has been told a version of this that is true and is short, and the counsellor says we add to it as he asks.
He asks about his father. Of course he does. I answer, and I do not editorialise, and it costs me something every time and it is not negotiable.
We did not get the townhouse back. It went into the receivership with the rest of it and by the time it could have been unwound there was a family living in it with a baby, and I looked at the paperwork on a Tuesday and told the lawyer to leave them alone.
We live in the north of the city now. It is smaller and the light is better.
My father and I have had eleven months.
It is not a reunion and I am not going to write it as one. He is seventy-four and he is not a warm man and he was, when I stood in front of him for the first time, unable to say almost anything at all.
We have dinner on the first Sunday of the month. He asks about Kellerman’s numbers, which I am no longer employed to know, and I tell him anyway.
In the ninth month he told me that in 2005 he had a letter drafted to me, and that he never sent it, because a woman he trusted told him his daughter had said she wanted no contact.
He said, “I should have written anyway. A letter is not a demand.”
That is the only regret he has ever expressed out loud and it took him eleven months to get to it.
The ring came back to me in a property envelope from the county, with an inventory sheet, seven months after that corridor.
It was never his grandmother’s. It was my grandmother’s — my mother’s mother’s — and I have the appraisal from 1994 to prove it, and he had said the opposite in front of forty people so smoothly that even I doubted it for a second while cuffed.
Enjoy your ten years. We’ll work out what to do with your money.
He said that with my ring in his pocket, holding another woman’s arm, in a corridor with my colleagues in it.
It was never my money. That is the joke at the bottom of the whole thing and it took me a year to be able to see it as one.
It was my father’s, and it went into my company without my knowing, and it went out of my company without my knowing, and the person who had actually been enjoying it — for twenty years, quietly, in instalments, from a nominee account — was my mother.
Brett Dunmore is the only man in this story who was ever wrong about whose money it was.
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